THE POETRY AND PRAYERS OF KEVIN HART
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/thepoetry-and-prayers-of-kevin-hart/2953494
Broadcast:
Sunday 5 June 2011 7:10AM
Kevin Hart has been described as the "most outstanding Australian poet of his
generation" and "one of the major living poets in the English language." He's also
an internationally recognised philosopher, theologian and literary critic. So who is
this former Brisbane boy, who was always bottom of his class in primary school?
And why does he address God as "Dark One"? This week on Encounter, the
sensual and sublime poetry of Kevin Hart.
Kevin Hart: When I was a little boy in England, growing up in London, I was
always at the bottom of the class and was thought to be very slow. I remember
one day the headmaster came to see my parents after school, and I think I was
about nine, and said there's nothing they could do for me and that I should be
taken out of school. And my mother took me to the local butcher's shop down the
road and tried to apprentice me to the butcher's, big hefty guys with arms like
legs of lamb, and they took one look at me and didn't want me, quite rightly.
Then my family emigrated to Brisbane, Australia, and I was still at the bottom of
the class.
READING FROM PoeM 'Brisbane' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: It's lucky Kevin Hart wasn't a big hefty lad. He may have made
a fine butcher, but the world of poetry would have lost a very fine voice.
Welcome to Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Carmel Howard.
Kevin Hart: And then one day, our first class in algebra, I remember looking at
the board and seeing a simple algebraic formula. And it was as though some
rusted window inside me just sprung open, and I understood exactly what was
going on in the algebraic formula, and I looked around me and saw the
classroom, my teacher, my friends, all of which was very familiar to me, as
though it was completely new, as though I'd never seen it before. And then over
the coming weeks when we had exams, to my surprise and to the astonishment
of my parents, I went from being at the bottom of the class to the top of the class.
And that was an experience I've never fully been able to understand. And I
sometimes worry that maybe that window will just spring shut one day.
1 READING FROM PoeM 'Brisbane' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: It doesn't seem as if that window of illumination is shutting on
Kevin Hart any time soon.
The renowned American critic, Harold Bloom, has called him 'the most
outstanding Australian poet of his generation' and 'one of the major living poets in
the English language.' Kevin Hart is also an internationally recognised
philosopher, theologian and literary critic. He's currently the Edwin B. Kyle
Professor of Christian Studies and Chair of the Religions Studies Department at
the University of Virginia, where he holds courtesy professorships in the
Departments of English and French. He also holds the Erin D'Arcy Chair in
Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University.
But back to Kevin and that sense of a 'rusted window' springing up in the
classroom of Brisbane's Oxley State High School, many years ago. What else
blew through after algebra class?
Kevin Hart: It was a complete opening of everything that I am. Shortly after that
experience, that I had had no ability in mathematics, I started reading quite
difficult mathematics books and I started doing algebra and geometry by myself,
and I worked on several theorems and sent them to the Head of Department of
the local university, the University of Queensland. I started to write poems, I
started to go out with a girl. Everything happened within a few dizzy weeks.
About that time, I had a very good English teacher called John McGrath, who did
something which would probably be almost illegal today: he made his students
learn poems by heart. So I had to learn for homework a poem by Shelley,
Ozymandias, and I thought it was wonderful, it utterly ravished me, and over the
coming weeks I wrote a lot of poor imitation Shelley and saved up my pocket
money and worked at a carwash in order to buy a volume of Shelley, and read all
of him, and was intoxicated by Shelley. And thereafter read Hopkins, and T.S.
Eliot, and couldn't be separated from these books, while all the time being
preoccupied by mathematics.
READING FROM PoeM 'Brisbane' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: Beneath the earthy, sensual surface of Kevin Hart's poetry,
there always rides something that's 'left unsaid' - something vast and mysterious,
an invisible, deeper world of the spirit.
It was also around that heady age of 13 that Hart began his spiritual search. It
was a search he initiated himself, having come from a family with no particular
interest in religion.
Kevin Hart: It was about that time I went to the local Southern Baptist Church, in
part because it was local and because an American boy in my class who went
there, and I found the hymns very, very moving. Hymns of such longing and
2 passion, and I found a kind of sublime simplicity in the service and in the prayers,
which I find very moving. It served a purpose for a long time, but this was the age
of the Vietnam War and it seemed to me after a while that there was a conflation
of republican politics, and Christianity, and my version of Christianity as I was
starting to form it at the time, was very different from that, and so in the end I
stopped going there.
READING FROM PoeM 'Dark Angel' (in Flame Tree)
Kevin Hart: When I was in my early 20s I converted to Catholicism after a long
period of searching. What I think drew me to the Catholic church is that in
Catholicism, prayer suffuses all of one's life by virtue of the sacraments. Prayer is
not something which occurs just on Sunday, it doesn't occur only at particular
moments of intensity or by particular conventions, one's whole life is given up to
prayer in many, many modes. And so everything to do with the faith is trying to
put you in relationship with God and trying to make that relationship grow deeper
and more mature.
Carmel Howard: I heard you say that you're interested in the mystical strain in
Catholicism. I wonder if you could explain why that mystical strain attracts you?
Kevin Hart: Catholicism is the big house of Christianity. It's got many, many
rooms in it. And I've always been attracted to the rooms which are to do with
prayer. The mystical strain is the strain whereby the whole day can be given over
to prayer through what we call lectio divina, prayerful reading of Scripture,
through practice of meditation of when one uses the imagination and the intellect
with respect to images, and then finally, and most difficult of all, contemplation,
where one empties the mind of all images and all ideas, all concepts, in order to
be completely attentive to God. What you find I think in this mystical strain of
Catholicism is that you're put in relationship with God, and you have many
opportunities not only of talking with God in petitionary prayer, but also of
listening to God, being attentive to God, as happens in contemplation.
READING FROM PoeM 'Prayer' (in Morning Knowledge)
Carmel Howard: Many of Kevin Hart's poems are concerned with Prayer, and
many take the title, 'Prayer'.
But while these poems stretch out towards the Divine, they never try to 'grasp'
God. As Hart suggests in his early poem 'Master of Energy and Silence', God is
beyond reach of language.
It's an approach that's in keeping with the tradition of Negative Theology.
Kevin Hart: The whole tradition in the West and in the East has been that there
are two threads in theology: there's cataphatic or positive theology, in which God
the Son is sent by the Father in and through the spirit, and hence we have
Revelation in scripture. And then there is apophatic or negative theology which is
3 to do with how we are to speak about God, that we begin from what Revelation
gives us but we question the predications that we make of God. So that when we
say 'God is good' for example, we don't mean God is good in the way that
chocolate is good, or wine is good, nor do we mean it in the sense in which
something might be a good action. Obviously divine goodness transcends all of
these things. So we question the predications and we pass from acts of knowing
to acts of unknowing, so that our speech is taken away from us and we're less
and less concerned with saying things about God than an intimacy, a silent
intimacy with God.
Carmel Howard: In Kevin Hart's book The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction,
Theology and Philosophy, written in 1989, he brings Negative Theology into
conversation with Jacques Derrida's concept of 'Deconstruction' by suggesting
that negative theology is, in fact, a mode of deconstruction.
Kevin Hart: Negative Theology shows us that our discourse as Christians, our
theological discourse and even our prayers, are constructions, using finite
language. And it allows us to glimpse the ways in which we construct that
discourse. Now the modern discourse that points out how we examine how
discourse is constructed is called deconstruction as Jacques Derrida calls it, it's a
mode of phenomenology. The very word 'deconstruction' comes from Luther in
his Heidelberg Disputation. Martin Heidegger translated from the Latin into
German and then Derrida translated it from the German into the French. And
what Luther was quoting is St Paul in 1 Corinthians 1-19, 'I shall destroy the
wisdom of the wise', and there Paul is actually quoting Isaiah 29-14, 'I shall
destroy the wisdom of the wise', namely 'I shall not rely upon the wisdom of
human beings, even as priests, even of popes, even of theologians, in talking
about God, but God himself is much greater than these things, and breaks
through all systems.
I think that the great early fathers of the church, Gregory of Nyssa for one,
Pseudo-Denys the Aeropagite for another, were attuned to this in their writings
and they make us see that everything we say about God is only very partial, only
constructed, and that what counts is not the statements we make about God, but
the intimacy of the relationship that we have with God.
READING FROM PoeM 'The Companion' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: Hart's early poem 'The Companion' which we've just heard,
gives voice to a mysterious intimacy with the Divine. In his more recent poetry,
Hart addresses God as 'Dark One', as he explains.
Kevin Hart: This came to me quite naturally one day when I was writing a poem.
There seems to be something poetically that doesn't work or is limiting when you
call God 'God' in a poem. When I tried to be honest with myself in my relationship
with God, Christ is, on the one hand, completely dark, he's transcendent and
unknown. On the other hand, he is completely imminent and completely
4 knowable as Jesus. Our tradition speaks of him in both ways as transcendent but
also as a lover who comes to us, and the two word 'Dark One' seem to me to
contain both things, the transcendence and otherness of Christ on the one hand,
but also like a kind of dark lover who comes to us. And I wanted to keep that
ambiguity.
READING FROM PoeM 'Dark Retreat' (in Young Rain)
Carmel Howard: Kevin Hart's poetry often blurs the lines between romantic and
religious longing, with erotic love becoming an allegory for Divine union.
It's a way of speaking that stems back to the Hebrew bible and to the Christian
mystical tradition.
Kevin Hart: It comes to us from the Song of Songs, the canticle, which is a
series of Hebrew love poems which were allegorised by the Jewish community
and by the early church, to be of the soul's longing for God. Divine love, agape, is
self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the
best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a
cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very,
very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.
But in the path to God, the path which leads to greater intimacy with God as
Therese Avila, John of the Cross and many others have pointed out. But agape
suddenly flips into eros, and the best way of understanding God's love for us is of
the kind of intimate love that men and women share.
READING FROM PoeM 'Nineteen Songs' (in Flame Tree)
Kevin Hart: The kind of love that God has for us, I think, is of an infinite longing
for union, and the kind of love that God wants us to have for him, I think, is of this
also endless longing. Now in eros we lose ourselves. I think erotic love
transforms us, but it does so only momentarily. It has to be embedded in
something much longer, a much bigger narrative called marriage or durable
relationship or something like that. In the relationship that we have with God,
most of that relationship I think is not characterised by the erotic, it's only in the
most intense moments of it that we can understand that what God wants with us I
think, is a union which is so intimate, the best image that we have as mortal,
finite creatures, is erotic love, is marriage. And so it's a momentary image that we
can have for the life that God ultimately wants with us.
MUSIC
READING FROM PoeM 'Come Back'(in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: You're with Encounter on ABC Radio National. I'm Carmel
Howard and we're hearing this week from the Australian poet, philosopher and
theologian, Kevin Hart.
5 As we've heard so far, Hart's poetry explores intimacy from many angles. In
poems like 'The Room', he addresses the deepest reaches of the self, which
can't be offered directly to consciousness.
For Hart, the 'deep self' is a presence that's beyond representation, like a closed
room at the centre of a house.
READING FROM PoeM 'The Room' (in Flame Tree)
Kevin Hart: When we talk about Transcendence, there's often two things that
are going on. There's that which is above or beyond phenomena, as we imagine
God to be; and there's also that which is beneath or prior to phenomena, the
roots of language, as you find in Heidegger ad Wittgenstein and others. And both
of these things are equally mysterious, it seems to me.
Now in a poem like 'The Room', it's concerned with something dark or secret or
mysterious in our own lives, that our lives turn around that, a secret that we can't
even explain to ourselves, a mystery that we can't present to our intellect and
decode it. Something which is so deep within us, that we can't articulate it. But
nor can we live without it, so there's always one room in our house, in our lives,
which is completely closed to us.
Carmel Howard: Are you suggesting something like the unconscious?
Kevin Hart: The unconscious could be a figure for it, but it's only one figure. I
think for most of us there's something in our lives which is either secret or
mysterious, that we can't articulate, and it would be different for each one of us.
In the Jewish tradition people talk about a secret proper name, which is inscribed
in us that we can't actually articulate; in the Christian tradition we often talk about
the Imago Dei, the Image of God, which is inscribed upon the soul, that we can't
pronounce. So in a sense, all of our lives turn endlessly around this unspeakable
word that we keep trying to find other words for. Every poem that I write is, in a
sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my
entire life turns.
MUSIC
Kevin Hart: I was in Melbourne, about to go out to dinner one evening and the
phone went, and it was a man with a fairly thick Spanish accent, and he told me
he'd just arrived in Adelaide, I think it was, from Chile, where he'd been in prison
in solitary confinement and tortured daily. And he said that before he was taken
into prison, the local bishop had and a number of people in the group he was
with, learned some of my poems in the Spanish translation. And I had no idea
that my poems had been translated into Spanish. And he said that while he was
being tortured each day he would recite 'The Room' and he said, 'that experience
of reciting your poem, kept me sane while I was being tortured, and I wanted to
tell you this, and thank you.' And then he hung up.
6 Carmel Howard: The mystery of language and its effects runs deep in Kevin
Hart's poetry.
For Hart, a contemporary religious poetry, to be defined as such, must question
any mode of representation, including language.
The limits of language become especially important in Hart's poetry of 'counterexperience'. But first, what is 'counter-experience'?
Kevin Hart: This is an expression, Jean-Luc Marion's, the French
phenomenologist, and I use that expression and various others like it in some of
my work as well. When we talk of experience, we talk of experiencing things
which are objects. Counter-experience is to do with our experience of things
which are not objective. They don't have the quality of objects. These are
phenomena, but they don't take the form of objects, like revelation or the sublime,
for example. Now when we are faced with the sublime or revelation, we can't
process it in the way that we can when we are perceiving an object, and this
sometimes is very frustrating, and sometimes it's exhilarating. You get the two
different modalities. And in poetry, often enough, we're talking about phenomena
which are not objects, we're talking about sublime experiences, and so a lot of
poetry, not all of it, but a lot of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry in particular,
is concerned with Counter-experience.
READING FROM PoeM 'Facing the Pacific at Night' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: In Hart's poem 'Facing the Pacific at Night', which we've just
heard, the speaker's senses are overrun by counter-experience.
It's a vast, mystical moment, described in terms of silence, darkness and longing,
terms that recall the Negative Theology Hart spoke of earlier.
'Facing the Pacific at Night' seems to suggest that everything we 'know' depends
on our ability to 'name' it, but these names simply point to a silent, dark grandeur
that goes on beneath the noise of the world.
In Hart's poem, 'Yes', the idea of counter-experience comes up again, but this
time, it appears lightly, as moments of radiance that are somehow strangely
affirming.
READING FROM PoeM 'Yes' (in Young Rain)
Kevin Hart: It's concerned with those strange moments of otherness that seem
to break in to our ordinary lives. It happens on days that go astray, I say, or when
time is inside-out a little. I think these are quite common experiences or counterexperiences when something seems imbricated in an ordinary day that we can't
quite identify, although there's been a sudden change of level of our experience.
And in the poem itself, it doesn't say what is being affirmed, it just affirms that
kind of counter-experience. I think what happens in a religious life is that we have
7 those experiences of affirmation and that one starts to live a Christian life or a
Jewish life or a Muslim life or a Buddhist life, by affirming that affirmation each
day. Each day you say 'Yes' to that Yes. So the life of being a Christian for
example, is always a life of double affirmation, that you each day say 'Yes' to
those counter-experiences of saying 'Yes', even when you're not experiencing
them at that time, you're remaining loyal to that experience.
So, in marriage for example, you say 'Yes' on the day you get married, 'I do', but
each day you implicitly if not explicitly, also say 'Yes', by every act that one
performs in a marriage, one is saying 'Yes', making a cup of coffee for one's wife
or husband is a form of saying 'Yes' to the marriage vow that one is continuing
the marriage by affirming it in one's deeds. And exactly the same in the religious
life.
MUSIC
If the religious life as I think it does, has the structure of double affirmation, it
means that even in periods of dryness, you are still affirming the fundamental
'Yes', the fundamental affirmation of God. Anselm says quite rightly, that 'faith is
always in quest of understanding', that we're always trying to understand what it
means to have faith in God. And our understanding, by the same token, as
Augustine says, is always in quest of faith. We don't always possess faith in the
sense of having a clear embodiment of something to hang on to. The relationship
between the intellect and faith is a very curious one. Sometimes the intellect can
point us to faith, sometimes the intellect can stand in the way of faith.
Sometimes, as St John of the Cross points out, we have to darken or blind the
intellect in order to have faith.
The relationship we have with God is not the same over a life; sometimes, as
with human relationships, it goes through bad patches and sometimes it
becomes very intense. It is a terrifying thing to have a relationship with one's
creator, to spend one's life so that one is trying to converge with one's creator
seems an extraordinarily difficult and sublime thing. But at the same time it's
extremely simple. One of the things which perpetually amazes me is that at any
moment or any day, anyone who is alive can talk with the creator of the cosmos.
But then when we try to reflect on it, when we try to do theology whether we're
theologians or ordinary folks who like to think about God, it's almost impossible.
How can you think about God who is absolutely singular, who's transcendent,
who escapes all of our mode of thought? As soon as we try to write the simplest
sentence about God, we find ourselves in anxious perplexities, but when we stop
trying to write about God and talk with God, God is there and we can talk with
God.
This paradox, it seems to me, is at the heart of the Christian life and not just the
Christian life, the religious life, and it's something we never can overcome.
8 Carmel Howard: And when you attempt to 'speak' to God in your prayer poems is there anything that you experience or learn in the process of that attempt?
Kevin Hart: I think that every prayer is thrown upon the void. It's always an
experiment. Prayer is sublimely easy because we can talk to God, but a lot of
what's involved in prayer I think is overhearing ourselves talk to God. Every
prayer involves a thorough-going critique of the person who is praying. So
whether one is saying a prayer or writing a poem which is a prayer, it always is
concerned with a moment of critique, of exposing the poverty of one's ability to
pray, and exposing the vacuity of one prays for.
READING FROM PoeM 'Lightning Words' (in Young Rain)
Carmel Howard: Kevin Hart's poems, like his prayers, have an attitude of
exposure and risk.
As we've heard so far, they grapple with the great unpresentables: God, the deep
self, 'counter' experience.
His poems also find words for the experiences of ageing and death.
As he ventures in his early poem, "The Old", written in his 20s (quotes from 'The
Old', in The Departure)
Kevin Hart: I think in society today we've almost completely medicalised death.
We're so scared of death that we want doctors to do the best they can to
medicate us so we don't feel pain. No-one dies at home any more, very few
people I think in terminal illnesses actually have an opportunity to confront their
death. We experience death in medical terms, we don't experience death as a
mystery. I think death is not simply the last few moments of life, death is
something that runs throughout the whole of life. Each of our moments is not only
the possibility of affirmation, but it's also we're saying farewell at each moment to
something.
So unless we form some kind of adequate relationship to death, we're never
going to live properly, and if we think of it purely as a medical thing, we have
reduced life. We should think of it as some sort of mystery which we can
participate in now, not something to be pushed off to one side till the last
moments.
READING FROM PoeM 'My Death' (in Flame Tree)
Carmel Howard: I wonder if you could also explain a little about the poems that
you've written for your friend David Campbell. You have said that you've had a
sense since his death, which was a long time ago now, a sense of your
friendship somehow continuing, and I was wondering whether that was
something that had happened in the act of poeticising his death.
9 Kevin Hart: David Campbell was a great poet, and he was a very good friend to
me when he was alive. When he passed away, in 1979, it was a huge loss. I've
never overcome that loss. I've had experiences over the years that are very
difficult to verbalise of David, as it were, looking out for me, watching over me,
drawing close to me and they've been profoundly moving, and I've written now
several poems about David. And it's strange to say that it's as though our
relationship has become richer since he's died than it could have been when he
was alive. I was young, very young, and he was getting old, and I have the
feeling in writing the poems that the relationship gets richer and more varied as
though I am talking with him and learning from him still. It's a very peculiar
experience, I must say.
READING FROM PoeM 'David' (in Morning Knowledge)
Carmel Howard: Whether speaking about loved ones or God, Kevin Hart's
poetry has long traced the movements of intimate relationships, and the pain of
absence.
In his latest collection Morning Knowledge, he grieves the passing of his father
who died in Brisbane in 2009.
In poem after poem, there's a sense of him searching out his father's life and
death, and of being haunted, surprised and confounded, again and again.
READING FROM PoeM 'My First Tie' (in Morning Knowledge)
Kevin Hart: So far at least, the writing of the poems has been an act of
mourning. I knew my father was going to die, I wrote about anticipating his death,
particularly in the poem called 'Dark Bird'. And when he died, a very easy death,
almost a happy death one could say, it was very traumatic, and I haven't
recovered from it, and I can't imagine that I shall. We were very close, and I've
had no sense of anything continuing. I knew when he died when I was in
Charlottesville, I was sitting at my desk in my office and I went suddenly
completely cold, and then a few minutes later, the phone went, and my wife
phoned and said my father had passed away just a few minutes ago. It was as
though his spirit went directly through me and chilled me to the bone. And since
then, just an utter void.
READING FROM PoeM 'Dark Bird' (in Morning Knowledge)
Kevin Hart: I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be
led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where
there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in
expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human
existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a
cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.
The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy,
10 with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with
everyday life. Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with
looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as
divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we
read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we
can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.
Poems which draw us close to prayer are, I think, doing more than that. I think
poetry has started to take on a supplementary role of prayer for some people.
The churches, I think, including my own, are terrible at teaching people how to
pray. It may be that we need to learn from the ground up as religious people,
whether Christian or not, how to pray.
READING FROM PoeM 'The Stone's Prayer' (in Flame Tree)
MUSIC
Carmel Howard: And that was 'The Stone's Prayer' by Kevin Hart - poet,
philosopher, theologian, and this week's guest on ABC Radio National's
Encounter program. My thanks to Kevin Hart. Thanks also to Eugene Gilfedder,
who read from Kevin Hart's new collection of poetry Morning Knowledge,
published by the University of Notre Dame Press. He also read from Young Rain,
published by Giramondo, and Flame Tree, published by Paperbark Press.
More details for this Encounter program are available at our website.
Technical production this week was by Peter McMurray. And I'm Carmel Howard. 11